A Florida woman got a pretty big – and scaly – shock this week when she looked at her doorbell camera after hearing noises at her front door.
“I heard a knock at the door and then nothing else,” Nathalie Gaines, who lives in Lake Mary, Florida, told FOX 35. “I waited a while and then I hear it again.
After she looked at the camera, she realized, “There was a full-blown alligator sitting at our front door.”
“It was big,” Gaines told the station, estimating the reptile at seven to eight feet.
She said after it “stood up and kind of banged on the door,” it laid back down.
“We always see wildlife, but not this up close, knocking on the door,” Gaines added.
The alligator waited at the door for a while before it finally decided to leave and head back to the nearby water.
Gaines said they frequently see bears and deer outside of her home, but this is the first alligator.
Video taken by Gaines shows the gator ambling across her driveway away from her house.
“He just wants to be left alone,” Gaines, who originally called a trapper before realizing they weren’t needed, told the station.
Another Florida woman had a more contentious encounter with an alligator earlier this month when she straddled the reptile and pried its jaws open after it grabbed her dog’s head in its mouth. Her dog survived.
